Office Remote Preview

Microsoft this week will ship a preview version of an interesting new solution called Office Remote that lets you tie your Windows Phone handset to a Bluetooth-powered PC and interact with Office documents in new ways. You might consider Office Remote as a productivity-focused take on Xbox SmartGlass, and Microsoft is interested to see how users would like it to evolve going forward.

I've been experimenting with Office Remote since late last week. There are a few components, including a Windows Phone 8 app and an Office 2013 add-in, both of which should be available in preview form by the time you read this. And in case it's not obvious, that limits things a bit from the outset, as it won't (yet) work with other mobile devices, or other versions of Office, including Office 2013 for Windows RT.

That, however, is by design. Bert Van Hoof, the group program manager for Office Mobile told me Friday that Office Remote is currently just a research project, and that Microsoft was putting it out in front of people early specifically to get feedback about this solution, and about how users might like to see it change going forward.

"Office Remote is a collaboration between the Microsoft Research and Office teams," he told me. "We have a bigger playground where we have these ecosystems of devices now, so we can really make an interesting mobile play. We looked at where we could add value, and connect to devices in unique ways, and make them complementary to each other."

The result is interesting. In its current form, the Office Remote mobile app can connect with PowerPoint, Word and Excel 2013, and the emphasis, as you might expect given the popularity of presentation remotes (and presentation remote mobile apps) is on PowerPoint. That is, it works like an advanced version of the presentation mobile apps you may have used previously—letting you control slide display on the PC/presentation device and see the next slide and so on—but with some more advanced features like a timer display, notes, and a pretty cool "laser pointer" view where you tap and hold on the device screen and a pretend red laser pointer appears on the displayed slide for viewers.

So, PowerPoint is easily understood. How does Office Remote work with Word and Excel?

As with PowerPoint, the functionality here is very much tied to the notion of a "remote." That is, what would you like or need to do when using Word or Excel to show information to others? In the case of Word, it lets you navigate between document sections and comments (for multi-author documents). With Excel, you can navigate between sheets in a multi-sheet workbook, but also pan and zoom and navigate between cells and change the data in any cell on the fly, which can lead to some very interesting displays if you're using charts or pivots.

Van Hoof told me to look towards such technologies as Xbox SmartGlass (a two-screen solution for the Xbox 360/Xbox One and virtually any mobile device) and the Nokia Photobeamer and Nokia Beamer mobile apps, which let you broadcast your phone-based photos or entire display to any web browser on any device, as potential guides. (No promises, of course.) "Office Remote is just another way in which you can take full advantage of the existing connections your devices have with your PC," he told me. "Lync meeting, everything else you do in Office, all continues to work. It's just a remote interface to that app."

With regards to feedback, Microsoft is very interested to see what people think about Office Remote, and how they'd like it to improve. As it turns out, the in-house version of Office Remote has a lot more functionality, but they wanted to ship a simple and basic version that had the features most users would want, and see where it went from there.

"This will expand over time," Van Hoof said. "It's just a playground now, and we'll get feedback and see how people like it, see what people bring to our attention. We're open to more feedback, to see how we expand it going forward."

When I asked about expanding this functionality beyond Office, to, say, Windows or Xbox, Van Hoof didn't want to speculate but admitted that those "intersections" are interesting. "We did talk to Xbox about SmartGlass early on," he said, "and it's safe to say you'll see more from Microsoft in the future with regards to connecting different pieces of glass [i.e. device screens]. There are interesting scenarios around [PixelSense] too. We will work with that. And we'll play the One Microsoft card more explicitly."

This is very cool! Microsoft should make an API available for developers to integrate this functionality into Metro apps. I would suggest to not only use Bluetooth as the connection, they should also add Wi-Fi Direct. This could be, by far, way better than Apple Airplay if implemented correctly.

Works fine on my Surface Pro & Lumia 920! I've been hoping for this ever since WP came out in Winter 2010! Can't wait to see how this evolves, I hope we see it built into Office by default (including Office on RT).

This is pretty cool. I had it loaded on my 928 and Surface Pro 2 within a couple of minutes and was controlling a PowerPoint presentation I was projecting off my computer right from my phone. The laserpointer feature I think is pretty clever and I can see myself using this during presentations.

So this is the one Microsoft vision in action? I guess this crazy notion that your division doesn't have to kill my division to get a bonus is working out.... or that if the ship sinks, all divisions will go to the bottom of the ocean seems to have finally made an impact at Redmond.

I'm liking this and can't wait for more. Who knows, we may get crazy things like a calendar with a week view in windows phone before 2014...you know crazy innovations!

I don't really get this. Why bother with something like this when Microsoft is already producing a touch version of Office, and Windows RT and Windows Phone will eventually merge? It sounds to me like this is just a skunkworks project to fill in time until all the pieces start clicking together. I mean, why remote into your "PC" when a Windows Phone will just end up being a true PC in your pocket, assuming that Microsoft will include some sort of "Responsive UI" (that's a web dev meme/buzzword-of-the-moment) that adapts automatically to the size of screen you're running it on? It doesn't make a lot of sense. Why not put these people into the Office feature team instead? Or put them into the RemoteApp team.... either way, they get work on real mainstream products that actually WILL see the light of day.

...in hindsight, they should've put the Courier team members into the Windows Devices team, and they could've produced a nice book-style version of the Surface, and had an influx of inspired creative apps for the platform.

Since you connect via Bluetooth, your tablet/PC has to be close by. This makes it useful (and great fun) for controlling PowerPoint presentations, but WORD and Excel? You're much faster with the mouse - but why not. With complex docs opened from SharePoint, WORD always crashes ("WORD does not work anymore...")
Looking forward to the development of the feature set. Variety is always a plus - use the best app for each scenario.

This is a really neat idea! But I can't get it to work - as soon as I select the presentation on my Windows Phone PowerPoint crashes. And it does so in such a way that seems to corrupt the presentation, which is extra special.

The Xbox One release date is now days away, and I've been very disappointed at the lack of push on the smartglass features. There is a lot of interesting work being done by rivals in game streaming particularly, meanwhile, smartglass seems to be a glorified remote, which IS a nice start, but just that.